Chapter 135: Shell Game II
TL;DR
Bill shuts down the entire Pokédex network after an “invasion” — Looker tells Red that Bill pulled the plug on the net because something spread through the Pokédex system, instantly reframing the crisis from a local anomaly at Cinnabar into a region-wide infrastructure attack.
Pallet Lab turns into a horror scene of fused machine-Pokémon — Red arrives to find Oak’s lab blown open, trainers holding a perimeter, and warped creatures made of desks, computers, glass, and metal killing Pokémon in single hits and resisting normal capture.
Red realizes the threat may be targeting him as much as Kanto — Looker bluntly argues that the timing is too perfect: the net is down, Red can’t rotate his roster, Pallet is under attack, and Red is exactly the kind of person who would run into that danger anyway.
Professor Oak destroys his own life’s work with Dragonite — After deciding there’s no safe way to stop whatever is coming out of the building, Oak mounts Goldie and levels Pallet Lab with waves of Draco Meteors while everyone watches in stunned grief.
The helmet footage shows only glitching static where the monsters should be — On video, the creatures barely render at all, just pixelated interference with flashes of wood and metal, hinting that whatever Red sees with his Silph Scope-enabled visor doesn’t translate normally to cameras.
The episode ends with Red finally finding the likely real objective: Bill’s lab — After talking through motives with Looker, Red abruptly realizes Bill is isolated, noncombatant, and sitting on a lab full of vulnerable tech; he teleports there, senses a second mind, and detects a chase happening below.
The Breakdown
The net goes dark, and Red realizes Cinnabar wasn’t isolated
The chapter opens with Interpol HQ nearly empty and Looker on an old radio because Bill has taken responsibility for bringing down the network. Bill says something was “invading” it through the Pokédex system, and the phrase hits Red hard because he just saw a Pokédex in Cinnabar turn into a monster and kill someone.
Pallet Lab becomes a battlefield
Red teleports home and finds Oak’s lab transformed from a symbol of healing and goodness into a war zone: shattered glass, smoke, and a loose perimeter of trainers blasting twitching, impossible things crawling out of the building. The emotional beat lands hard—Red isn’t ready for how much it hurts to see this place broken, especially with the possibility that people inside are already dead.
These creatures don’t fight like Pokémon
Red joins the defense with Charizard and Starmie and quickly learns the new monsters are fused junk-and-machine bodies with bizarre movement, blinking across space and surviving impacts that should stop them. One kills a Pinsir instantly; another only goes down after Scyther and Primeape literally break it apart, and even then everyone watches the pieces to make sure it stays dead.
Red starts playing messenger because the usual systems are gone
Dr. Madi tells him the lab’s computers simply started transforming, and that Poké Balls only worked briefly at first. With communications crippled, Red uses teleportation as emergency infrastructure: warning a ranger outpost, racing to Professor Oak’s house, and then finally returning to Looker, who classifies the Pallet situation as at least a “tier two,” maybe “three.”
Looker calls out the obvious trap Red keeps refusing to name
Back at Interpol, Red learns a brutal second-order consequence of the outage: Jensen and the others are stranded in Cinnabar because the Saffron teleporters are down. While reviewing helmet footage that turns the monsters into glitchy static, Looker stops being diplomatic and tells Red this all “stinks” — hometown threatened, no backup, no roster swapping, unknown enemy, and Red still about to go back in alone.
The fight escalates, and Oak makes the impossible call
Red returns with radios and helps hold off more of the creatures, watching one split in two and another punch a fatal hole through his Nidoqueen. Then Professor Oak, half-shaven and radiating tightly controlled fury, decides there’s no way to know if the lab will stop producing these things without going inside—so instead he rides his Dragonite Goldie into the sky and obliterates Pallet Lab with repeated Draco Meteors.
In the aftermath, Red realizes exhaustion may be part of the plan
Red helps identify surviving anomalies in the rubble with Starmie and Charizard, then finally notices his own psychic overextension: the battle calm is weaker, his partitions are fraying, and he feels the same dangerous mental strain he felt at Silph. Looker immediately latches onto that, agreeing the operation may be designed both to spread chaos and to wear Red down so he misses the real move.
The real target clicks into place: Bill
Over tea and biscuits, Red and Looker work backward through possibilities—Silph, Sabrina, the labs, Rocket, Rowan—until one missing piece suddenly feels wrong. Bill shut down the net, he’s alone, not a trainer, and his lab is packed with vulnerable technology; Red teleports to his house, instantly senses “the offness” of a second mind, and detects a chase happening in the tunnels below before sprinting in.